Hayden White, history as narrative: a constructive approach to historiography

Author: Paul Sutermeister

Abstract

In this essay we argue that the concept of history as narrative (Metahistory) defended by the
American philosopher of history Hayden White represents a constructive approach to
historiography. We consider briefly the origins and the content of White’s theory, how White
criticizes historians and how they criticize him. We conclude that, by denying universal truths,
10White’s concept criticizes Western scientific and rationalistic – ethnocentric - worldviews,
perceived as justifications for the use and abuse of power and authority.

Introduction

In this essay I will argue that the concept of history as narrative defended by the American
philosopher of history Hayden White[1] represents a constructive approach to historiography. My
arguments are based on White’s key texts[2]: Metahistory[3]: the historical imagination in
nineteenth-century Europe (1973), Tropics of discourse: essays in cultural criticism (1978)
and The content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (1987) on
the one hand, and on monographs which interpret White’s concept of history as narrative on the
other hand. My essay offers a very limited approach in view of the hundreds of texts which are
20available (but mostly difficult to obtain), but with my sources I could grasp the theme. I consider
four parts: 1) the origins and the content of White’s theory, 2) how White criticizes historians, 3)
how historians criticize White, and 4) why White’s theory represents a constructive approach to
historiography. In conclusion, I will look at the concept in a larger context.

1) The origins of White’s theory.

Hayden White’s concept of history as narrative, which he developed in his Metahistory, states
that historical works in general take the form of a narrative, in the sense of a “coherent and
ordered representation of events or developments in sequential time”[4]. He says that all
historical explanations are rhetorical and poetic by nature.[5]

The concept of history as narrative has wide implications; it led among other aspects to the
30postmodernist debate about historiography.[6] Postmodernism is skeptical towards any claims of
certainty in sciences; in historiography postmodernism is identified with the linguistic turn,
which refers to the priority given to language.[7]

White developed his own argument through the cases of four historians (Michelet, Ranke,
Tocqueville, and Burckhardt) and four philosophers of history (Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and
Croce).[8] He identified four rhetorical styles[9] through which the authors presented their
interpretations: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony,[10] and four different literary
 genres[11] by which the historians figured historical processes in their work as stories of a
particular kind: Romance, Tragedy, Comedy, and Satire.[12]

White’s view of historical texts as literary artifacts erases the distinction between history and
40story.[13] The authors he analyzed had other messages that they wanted to convey, so that the
historical past was the medium but not the message of the historical work.[14] As he says,
comparable to good narratives, historical works carry the reader smoothly but directly to the
conclusion the author has in mind.[15]

2) How White criticizes historians.

White’s text contains a radical critique of historical methodology and the consciousness of
historians. His concept of history as narrative, as a literary genre, calls into question the claims
of truth[16] and objectivity in historical work.[17] According to White, historical narratives are
verbal fictions, their contents are as much invented as found and their forms have more in
common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences.[18] As he
50says, while historical narratives proceed from empirically validated facts or events, they
necessarily require imaginative steps to place them in a coherent story;[19] they also represent
only a selection of historical events. Thus, truth is limited.[20]

White says that history fails if its intention is the objective reconstruction of the past because “the
process involved is the literary one of interpretative narrative, rather than objective empiricism
[or] social theorizing”. Thus, we have to take into account the rhetorical, metaphorical and
ideological strategies of explanation employed by historians.”[21] Narratives explain why events
happened, but are “overlaid by the assumptions held by the historian about the forces influencing
the nature of causality. These might well include individual or combined elements like race,
gender, class, culture, weather, coincidence, geography, region, blundering politicians, and so on
60and so forth. So, while individual statements may be true [or] false, narrative as a collection of
them is more than their sum.”[22]

3) How historians criticize White.

Historians supply a) formal critics and b) critics in content of the concept of history as
narrative.

a) White’s argumentation is seen as too formalist, “downplaying the significance of the content of
the historian’s work”[23] Critics say that, given the nature of time,[24] narration is the only
realistic representation of the past.[25] The fact that historic reality is not accessible otherwise
than by the intermediary of language should not permit to affirm that we just have to study
language.[26]

70Further is criticized that White based his arguments only on the historical work of the 19th
century, and does not include the contemporary one which can be seen as renewed, as more
“enlightened”.[27] The identification of only four literary genres, all from the Western literary
 tradition, and four basic rhetorical styles is also controversial:[28] his arguments seem to be
constructed too arbitrarily.

b) Critics in content say that White’s concept of history as narrative has nothing to offer
historians, that it just undermines the traditional historiography.

Thompson remarks that the concept of history as narrative has a status of a “theology with no
foundation” beyond the indisputable “gospels” of White and other “prophets”,[29] and that
White’s reasoning emerged and had its success during the “nausea of the 1968 hangover”[30].
80Thompson’s remark shows the irritation of historians.

White’s critics defend the value of historical work: it depends on hard archival research, looks out
carefully for forgery and falsification and thus operates with a notion of truth.[31] Historians
don’t invent anything; they are operating within pre-existing, collectively developed frameworks
of assumptions, knowledge and questions.[32] Their work assembles evidence comprehensively
and attempts to establish a convincing interpretation. And it ‘brings to life’ the times, the
conditions and the mentalities under consideration.[33] As historicists say, individual creativity
and imagination enters inevitably in the historical work, because historians are human beings.
[34]

A hard critic holds White responsible for eliminating the research for truth as the main task of the
90historian (as Ginzburg, one of White’s main opponents says: the debate about truth is the most
important intellectual issue)[35]. White’s relativism would be so dangerous that it could be even
responsible for revisionism, a nasty phenomenon in historiography. For example, in White’s view,
relationships among historical events exist ‘only’ in the mind of the historian. If we really
believed this in its full sense we would have to say that there are no real connections between
different things which happened in the past. In his b sense, White’s theory says that there was not
any ‘real’ connection, actually ‘given’ in the past and ‘found’ by the historian, between the
appointment of Hitler as German Chancellor in 1933, and the Holocaust of 1941-5 – a perverse
conclusion.[36]

4) Why White’s theory represents a constructive approach to historiography.

100White’s concept of history as narrative still represents a constructive approach to historiography

since I identified in my readings that the two opponent views are based on two different
intellectual levels: historians are worried about their profession whereas we could say about
White, that he intends, on a more global level, to pull the historical science from a crisis[37] in
order to lead it to a positive renewal. His objective was, as he says, to “rescue” history; in the
interest of appearing scientific and objective, history had “repressed and denied to itself its
greatest source of strength and renewal”.[38] In fact, White stimulated positively the debate
between empiricists, which defend the claims of truth in historical work,[39] and postmodernists
about the nature of historical knowledge. A result of the debate between postmodernists and
empiricists, as Gilderhus concludes, is that, to maintain the integrity of their discipline, historians
110would have to instruct historical fundamentalists who insist upon “sacred” versions of an
unchanging past and to persuade unbelieving skeptics who deny its “knowability”.[40]

By denying universal truths, White’s concept criticizes Western scientific and rationalistic –
ethnocentric - worldviews, perceived as justifications for the use and abuse of power and
authority.[41] History “devoted exclusively to the activities of white male elites of European
extraction is no longer the standard.”[42] It is also not proved that White’s theory had an
influence on revisionism. White criticized “naïve empiricism”; he named key theoretical
questions about truth and objectivity, which all historians face.[43]

Conclusion

Hayden White’s concept of history as narrative caused quite a stir and nourished the debate
120between empiricists and postmodernists about the nature of historical knowledge, about the most
important question in history: truth and untruth. It is not useful for historiography to look at
White only as a provocation, as the conservative critics I observed make; humanity will probably
forget the works of White, but we should concede that there is innovation by scrutinizing. As the
world has changed, history and historical writing also changes: in a globalized world, with a
multiplication of points of view to history, scrutinizing one’s own view is inevitable.

Developing historiography means developing historians’ conscience and practice. Therefore,

White’s concept of history as narrative represents a constructive approach to historiography. As
history is an ambiguous and difficult matter (as which White regarded it), it looks like a Kantian
concept: ‘the thing itself is unreachable, but its phenomenon can be apprehended through the
130structures of thought’.